Gods of the Valley: How Today's Tech Giants Monopolize the Future

The current state of podcast advertising is a situation not so different from the early web:

The distribution channels that underpinned the rise of today’s Internet giants have dried up. Google, Facebook, and Amazon serve as a triopoly that dominates online advertising. The three accounted for 90% of US digital advertising in 2020, up from 80% in 2019. The arbitrage that once existed on these platforms has more or less disappeared and CPMs... See more

Personalized podcast ads: Canned advertisements do exist and can be inserted dynamically. But host-read ads remain the gold standard. Given that fact, how can we combine the dynamism of programmatic ads with the intimacy of host-read ones?

Voice synthesis technology may be the solution. A new startup would help existing podcasters create “voiceprints” based on existing content. Then, within the system, advertisers could bid to target anonymized individuals based on their demographics but divorced from the podcast they were listening to. Staking creators: creators to serve as curators... See more

Advertising at its core is a market for attention. In any future version of the internet, I’d expect markets for attention to pop up. It’s a natural barter between one party with a surplus of attention and another party with a deficit. It particularly makes sense for direct response advertising. An auction for purchasing intent is a very good way t... See more

I strongly believe podcast advertising is the most under appreciated, mid-priced advertising channel today. When you think: Our average sponsor has an ACV of $24,000. So with 1 converted lead, they have made 2.4/1 LTV to CAC. Just 1. We average 27 converted. 🤯

The difference in margin between e-commerce and advertising has become a much bigger story than Amazon: everyone from Uber to Walmart to Instacart is pushing into ‘merchant media’, and hiring at scale